A leading climate scientist predicted that the Arctic would be ice-free in five years — five years ago.

An article in The Guardian published in August 2008 reported the Professor Wieslaw Maslowski of the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey Calif., and his team produced a forecast “which indicated that by 2013 there will be no ice in the Arctic, other than a few outcrops on islands near Greenland and Canada, between mid-July and mid-September.”

Maslowski said: “The crucial point is that ice is clearly not building up enough over winter to restore cover and that when you combine current estimates of ice thickness with the extent of the ice cap, you get a very clear indication that the Arctic is going to be ice-free in summer in five years.”

The article also quoted Professor Peter Wadhams of Cambridge University in Britain: “Now the most detailed computer models suggest the Arctic’s summer ice is going to last for only a few more years.”

Arctic ice did not disappear last summer, however. And the National Snow and Ice Data Center has reported that the “average sea ice extent for January 2013 was 5.32 million square miles.”

President Obama showed that he has bought into the global warming hysteria when he declared in his State of the Union address on Tuesday: “For the sake of our children and our future, we must do more to combat climate change.”

Respected climate scientist Richard Lindzen, who is the Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Meteorology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said in remarks quoted by the Climate Depot website: “Future generations will wonder in bemused amazement that the early 21st century developed world went into hysterical panic over a globally averaged temperature increase of a few tenths of a degree, and, on the basis of gross exaggerations of highly uncertain computer projections combined into implausible chains of inference, proceeded to contemplate a roll-back of the industrial age.”

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